Monday, 15 June 2015

The C-Word

No apologies for returning today to the strange case of
the “moderate” Jabhat al-Nusra rebels, the throat-cutters and
executioners who are playing the anti-Isis card to woo the US.

Their
leader, you may recall, told Qatar’s Al Jazeera channel that his al-Qaeda
affiliated warriors will oppose both Isis and Bashar al-Assad – and even
protect Syria’s Christian and Alawite minorities.

The usual American
nomenklatura are telling the world this is tosh.

It’s the “conspiracy
theorists” who are to blame, they say, for suggesting that the US might send
barrel-loads of new weapons to such men. No. The US would never deal with those
who are on its infamous, though pointless, “terrorist list”.

Besides, Qatar
would never promote these killers as moderates – would they?

Well, first,
let’s take another look at all these conspiracy theorists.

By chance, that
inestimable French journal Le Monde Diplomatique this month carries a wodge of
articles under the title “Did you say conspiracy?”, painfully dissecting how
many false-flag stories turned out to be true.

There’s the Mukden incident, for
example, a 1931 Chinese attack on imperial Japan which turned out to be a
Japanese attack on China and led to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the
Rape of Nanking, et al.

Then there’s the 1933 burning
of the Reichstag which might have been started by the Nazis rather than the
communists; the successful – and real – CIA-MI5 plot to overthrow Iran’s
elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, in which bombs were supposedly
planted by (yet again) communists; Israel’s 1954 “Operation Susannah” in which
Israeli-organised attacks on UK and US buildings in Cairo were blamed on
Egyptian nationalists; and the 1964 Tonkin incident, when America reported
totally imaginary North Vietnamese attacks on a US warship, which led to the
very real launching of the Vietnam War.

Interestingly, Latin America provides
even more proof of real US plots: Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Argentina,
Nicaragua, Cuba, you name it.

The French monthly also carries a
very fair critique of those who believe George W and his chums engineered the
9/11 attacks – as if a US president who screwed up everything he ever did in
the Middle East was capable of bringing down the World Trade Centre – and of
the Arab world’s obsession with Western conspiracies that allow dictators and
nations to duck their own responsibility for terrible events.

Thus, the lie that a female
Israeli official had sex with Arab leaders to blackmail them into supporting
pro-Israeli policies; the perpetrator of this nonsense, the Egyptian newspaper
Al Masry Al Youm, later apologised – but, courtesy of the internet, the lie is
still repeated.

Western powers, Arabs are told,
conspired to create the 2011 Middle East revolutions to produce instability and
civil war in the Arab world.

The Americans planned the insurgency against Assad
and the coup against Mubarak – the former to rid Israel of its most powerful
neighbour, the latter intended to bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power and
“diminish the greatness of Egypt”.

Egyptian activists protesting the brutality
of the coup’s winners – the army – are accused of taking money from Western
intelligence agencies to further their cause. Even Brigadier-General-President
al-Sisi believes this stuff.

Algerians still claim that the French Deuxième
Bureau (an institution that ceased to exist in 1940) is today the puppeteer
behind all Algerian political movements.

So I join, I think, the average
reader of The Independent in responding to this tomfoolery with a great English
expression: what a load of old cobblers!

But wait.

When I was in Syria a few days
ago, I heard several times that the Iranians, who have lost their own men
defending the Assad regime, are stingy when it comes to economic assistance.

One source in Damascus told me that they demand guarantees of real estate on
any expenditure for the Syrian military.

I don’t know if this is true, but just
take a look at the latest estimates of the extremely undistinguished UN special
envoy Staffan de Mistura who now announces that Iran spends, as much as £4bn a
year on the Syrian regime – excluding, by the way, the cost of Iranian military
personnel, the Hezbollah and Iraqi Shias fighting for Syria – a figure only
And all this money supposedly
comes from a country whose economy has been broken by sanctions?

It doesn’t
take a pea-brain to work out that if Iran still intends to manufacture nuclear
weapons – the Israeli line – and has so much money to splurge on its allies,
then it remains a far greater threat to Israel and Sunni states than al-Nusra
or Isis or any other crackpot Islamists in the region.

And thus the Qataris are
today officially joining the campaign to “clean” the al-Qaeda killers of al-Nusra.

A conspiracy theory, of course.

Think again.

Read the words of
the Qatari Foreign Minister, Khaled al-Attiyah, in an interview with Le Monde
last month.

“We are clearly against all extremism,” he stated, “but, apart from
Daesh [Isis], all [sic] these groups are fighting to overthrow the [Assad]
regime. The moderates cannot say to the Nusra Front ... ‘We won’t work with
you’. You have to look at the situation and be realistic.”

In other words, al-Nusra’s sole
aim is to destroy the Assad regime and, ergo, it is on the same side as the
“moderates” and worthy of the same military assistance.

If the “moderates”
can’t say to al-Nusra, “We won’t work with you”, then how could the US?

Intelligence reports to the
French government have been recording US air strikes against Isis that have
avoided endangering positions held by al-Nusra.

When Isis arrived in its
thousands to assault Palmyra last month – for the most part, in broad daylight
– not one US plane appeared in Syrian skies.

And all this when US pilots have
been returning from almost 75 per cent of their missions against Isis with
bombs still on board because they couldn’t find targets.

You don’t have to be a reporter,
let alone a conspiracy theorist, to see the warning lights around the “war on
terror” story in Syria.

Because some of the terrorists are soon going to be our
terrorists – as long as they fight the even more horrible terrorists and the
Assad terrorists at the same time.

All they need is more cash and more weapons.
And I bet you they’ll get them, courtesy of the ol’ US of A.